Know your enemy

Americans have missed a rare opportunity to size up Osama bin Laden, to watch his gestures and body language, to hear unexpected variations in his speech, to puzzle over his new choice of targets of his hatred, to judge whether he is self-confident or getting rattled. The chance came in a 20-minute videotape seen elsewhere around the world – but not on American television.

White House officials had asked network executives last month to exercise self-censorship and avoid verbatim coverage of the man pegged as the leader of an anti-American terror campaign. This was after Mr. Bin Laden’s videotaped statement on Oct. 7, which was widely broadcast. The officials called such tapes mere propaganda. Without presenting evidence, they suggested that he might be using the tapes to send hidden messages to his terrorist network.

The networks, whether through patriotism or out of fear that they might seem to be obstructing the war effort, promised to treat future broadcasts with care. When the next tape was broadcast by al Jazeera, an Arab satellite channel on Nov. 3, American networks showed only brief scenes of the bearded terrorist with his AK-47 assault rifle while news anchors read quotations or paraphrased versions of Mr. bin Laden’s statements that executives had deemed newsworthy.

What Americans missed was not only the full body of what Mr. Bin Laden had to say but also a televised response by an American official, Christopher Ross, a former U.S. ambassador to Syria and Algeria. Mr. Ross, at the invitation of the Arab TV station, spoke for 15 minutes in fluent Arabic, criticizing Mr. bin Laden and denying his accusations. The rest of the world could get the whole picture, but most Americans couldn’t.

Mr. bin Laden is worth a close watch as he changes his story while his forces are driven into a corner. In 1996, his emphasis was on the stationing of U.S. troops in Saudi Arabia in connection with the Persian Gulf War. In his Oct. 7 video statement, he extended his complaints to Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians and United Nations sanctions against Iraq. In his latest statement, he went on to list Chechnya as a Muslim-Christian conflict and targeted President Vladimir Putin and “the Russian bear,” southern Sudan, Somalia, Kashmir, Bosnia, East Timor and the Philippines.

“If this is propaganda, it is newsworthy propaganda,” wrote Robert H. Giles, curator of the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University, in The New York Times. “Bringing it to the American public might give some comfort to the enemy – but even that is far from clear. … The attacks on the United Nations and its secretary general, Kofi Annan, could indicate how great al- Qaida’s fear is of a broadly international, rather than American, effort.”

The Bush administration made a mistake in blacking out material that would have bolstered its case that the conflict is global, not merely American, and that al-Qaida is an aggressor against the whole world. It is a mistake easily corrected. The White House should reverse course and press the networks to those speeches thoroughly. Then they would really be helping the war effort.